Mirjam Aeschbach studierte Religionswissenschaft und englische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft im Bachelor (2010-2014) und schloss im Januar 2017 das Masterstudium in Religionswissenschaft und Gender Studies an der Universität Zürich ab. Einen Teil ihres Masterstudiums verbrachte sie an der Universität Utrecht, Niederlande, um den Forschungsschwerpunkt Religion und Gender in der europäischen Öffentlichkeitsdiskursen zu vertiefen.

Ihr Dissertationsprojekt, in dem sie sich mit der medialen Verhandlung von nationaler Zugehörigkeit im Diskurs über muslimische Frauen in der Schweiz beschäftigt, führt sie im Rahmen eines 3-jährigen Doc.CH-Forschungsstipendiums des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds durch. 2019 verbrachte sie 6 Monate als visiting fellow am Center for Religion, Media and Culture an der University of Colorado, Boulder.

Von 2017-2018 arbeitete sie zudem als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Religionswissenschaften mit sozialwissenschaftlicher Ausrichtung in Zürich. Zudem arbeitete sie als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Sozialpsychologie und Hochschulforschung (ETHZ D-GESS) und im Rahmen des SNF-Projekts "Ausdifferenzierung des Zeitschriftenmarktes in der Schweiz und Deutschland" am Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung an der Universität Zürich.

• Religion und Medien
• Digitale Religion
• Religion und Politik in medialen Diskursen
• Identitätsprozesse und Nationale Identität
• Gender und Religion
• Islam im gegenwärtigen Europa

Shaping the Boundaries of National Belonging:
Muslim Women in Switzerland across German-speaking Media Platforms

The project is conceptualized as a qualitative media analysis of how national belonging is shaped by Muslim women in the German-speaking part of Switzerland across digital and non-digital media platforms. Research on current Western European contexts suggests that religion, and specifically Islam, is a key issue when acceptable measures of difference within a particular nation are publicly negotiated. In Switzerland, debates on Islam have characterized many political endeavours on questions about the extent to which Islam is socially acceptable, for instance the initiative to ban minarets or the more recent venture to ban veiling. Such issues have also figured prominently in media outputs, as for instance in the NZZ Folio “Muslims in Switzerland: How much Islam can the country tolerate?” (2016). Muslim women actively take part in these debates on the relationship between Islam and Switzerland and negotiate their own positionalities and the way they are entangled with notions of national belonging. With issues of gender equality figuring prominently as normative demarcation strategies and Muslim women frequently marking images of “self” and “other” in public debates, analysing the contributions of Muslim women sheds light on how such representations are taken up, re-appropriated, and potentially challenged.

This project addresses two central questions: (1) Which Muslim women take part in the current public media discourse on Islam in the German-speaking part of Switzerland? (2) How do these women shape images of “self” and “other” and thereby patterns of national belonging across media platforms? Methodically, the research is based on Altheide’s Qualitative Media Analysis (2013) and approaches the research questions in two ways: (a) Muslim women who actively figure as discourse actors in media outputs are identified and (b) their discourse contributions are tracked across digital, non-digital, and social media platforms. In the subsequent qualitative document analysis, the intersectional subject positions of these Muslim women, the frames and patterns of interpretation with regard to national belonging, and the content-related differences between communication platforms are explored. The first-time focus on Muslim women across media will further result in a differentiated picture of their specific use of different media platforms and will shed light on the active contribution of Muslim women to images of national belonging in Switzerland.

• Aeschbach, Mirjam (2020): "Invoking the Secular: Gendered Delineations of Muslim Belonging in Switzerland", in: Entangled Religions 11(1): 1-23).
• Aeschbach, Mirjam (2020): "Review of Representations of Muslim Women in German Popular Culture, 1990-2015, by Lauren Selfe", in: German Studies Review 43(2): 441-443. doi:10.1353/gsr.2020.0070.
• Hug, Sven and Mirjam Aeschbach (2020): "Criteria for assessing grant applications: a systematic review", in Palgrave communications, 6(37), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0412-9.
• Aeschbach, Mirjam and Dorothea Lüddeckens (2019): "Religion on Twitter: Communalization in Event-Based Hashtag Discourses", in: Online-Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 14, Special Issue on Community on the Internet, 108-130.
• Aeschbach, Mirjam (2018): Negotiating British Muslim Identity on Twitter: #WhatBritihsMuslimsReallyThink, Investigating a Hashtag Discourse, Berlin: AkademikerVerlag.
• Aeschbach, Mirjam (2017): "#WhatBritishMuslims-ReallyThink: Negotiating Religious and National Identity on Twitter", in: Zeitschrift für junge Religionswissenschaft 12, 1-16.
• Aeschbach, Mirjam (upcoming): "Verweigertes Händeschütteln und die Politik geschlechtsspezifischer Kulturalisierungen", in: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaften, Themenheft zum Fall Therwil.

BA-Seminar: Religion im digitalen Raum FS18 (VVZ FS 18)
Winterschool: Perspectives on Religion and Gender (VVZ HS 17)

• 2019: Visiting Fellow am Center for Media, Religion and Culture (CMRC), University of Colorado, Boulder
• GRC Peer Group Religion und Politik
• Digital Society Initative UZH (Mitgliedschaft ausstehend), angegliedert im Forschungsschwerpunkt "Communication"
• Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Religionswissenschaft (SGR / SSSR)
• Deutschen Vereinigung für Religionswissenschaft (DVRW), Arbeitskreis "Religion und moderne Massenmedien"